The present invention relates to a hair fixative film composition, and methods of fixing and maintaining the hair in a given style by applying said hair fixative film composition to the hair shafts.
A significant portion of the globe uses some sort of hair styling product as part of a grooming routine. These styling products come in a variety of forms. These forms include non-aerosol and aerosol hair sprays, aerosol and non-aerosol mousses, gels, glazes, styling waters, spray gels, spray mousses, waxes, pastes, pomades, and ringing gels, among others. The overall market for these hair styling products continues to grow even though some specific categories have been flat or declining in recent years. There are many reasons for the market decline of some application types, but one reason is that each application has some inherent limitations. These limitations can create performance and aesthetic weaknesses.
Ingredient incompatibility is one such limitation. For instance, incompatibilities between traditional gel thickening polymers and traditional high performance styling polymers lead to less than ideal product properties. These traditional high performance polymers provide superior humidity resistance and setting power to common polymers compatible in gels, but the combination with popular thickeners such as carbomer, a cross-linked polyacrylate, results in hazy gels with poor rheology.
Additional application type limitations include the inability to include polymers with poor solution stability, limits on polymer use levels, product bulkiness, and inconvenience of use. Therefore, there exists a need for new application methods that deliver excellent hair fixative properties, have no negative ecological perceptions, provide formulation versatility, and are fun and convenient to use.
Recently, a new composition for delivering hair fixative polymers from a starch film has been disclosed in U.S. patent application 2003/0099692. Surprisingly, it has now been found that with proper formulation traditional high performance hair fixative polymers can be formed into acceptable films, which can be used as hair fixative films, without the addition of starch or any other film forming polymer as the delivery vehicle. It has also surprisingly been found that films containing hair fixative polymers can also be created containing starch and large amounts of plasticizer. Such films may provide such benefits as excellent high humidity curl retention, film toughness, gloss, stiffness, combing ease, static properties, spring, and webbing when applied to hair. In addition, such films may be more efficient as the hair fixative polymer is less diluted by the addition of other non-functional ingredients.